“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Emphasis mine.

Several thoughts spring to mind, in order of significance:

1. It is ironic that he is concerned about government subsidies for the poor since he expects the federal government to subsidize his cattle ranching.

2. Now that many on Fox News have so openly embraced Bundy’s cause, how will they deal with this?

3. This is another example of a prominent figure supported by some on the right who turns out to have racist views. Many politicians and commentators now have to figure out how to extricate themselves from this situation. This reminded me of a recent piece by Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast: You’re in Denial if You Think Steve Israel Is Wrong About GOP Racism, the subtitle of which states “Not a month goes by without a GOP racial gaffe, racist vitriol fills conservative websites’ comment sections, and the party refuses to take on the issue.” So I guess this one for this month.

And no, Bundy is not a Republican official, but he is a registered Republican who has become a cause célèbre in some Republican circles. At a minimum, these statements will be associated in the minds of many with the Republican Party and will further solidify what Representative Israel (D-NY) said on TV recently: “to a significant extent, the Republican base does have elements that are animated by racism.” Bundy and his allies are, without a doubt, part of that base. And this a problem that the Republican Party, writ large, refuses to address.

I have considered the man to be a crank unworthy of support from the beginning, and have marveled at the many who have rallied to his cause. It will be interesting to see how much of the rallying continues.

There is more to say on this topic, no doubt, but I will stop here for the moment.

A side note in parting, if Bundy rejects the authority of the federal government, why all the American flags?

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About Steven L. TaylorSteven L. Taylor is Professor and Chair of Political Science at Troy University. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. He is the author of Voting Amid Violence: Electoral Democracy in Colombia and is currently working on a comparative study of the US to 29 other democracies. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging at PoliBlog since 2003.
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Comments

A side note in parting, if Bundy rejects the authority of the federal government, why all the American flags?

’cause the flag is a sacred symbol of Americanness! It’s sacred, it’s not some secular symbol of earthly authority!

I recall seeing a map once that showed where black populations lived in the United States, and I am constantly surprised to see so many racists outside the South. Like, a Montanan who didn’t like blacks would have no basis (fictional or otherwise) for that belief because next to no black people live in Montana. I don’t recall Nevada having a sizeable black population either. This dude’s story about driving past a project is probably, if true, the only “interaction” with black people’s he’s ever had.

I mean, I get how you can be racist to a race you’ve never even seen, but it just seems inauthentic. I prefer authentic racism. I’m weird like that.

If a devious liberal had decided to script an event in order to illustrate the worst tendencies of (part of*) the contemporary American Right, I’m not sure it could have been much better than this.

* Like I said, part of. I know that the Right has split over Bundy, and many of the more level-headed types (and even Glenn Beck!) have avoided actually backing him. This is good, because his entire case is bullshit from top to bottom, and he turns out to be a nasty character to boot.

Everytime I see these idiots (yes, Tillman, I know they’re idiots) waving the flag pretending they are the patriots in these situations, I just see red. They are not patriots, they demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what this country is about, and they need to be call out at every instance.

Well, which is it, Cliven? Do they abort their children? Or do they spawn a huge welfare brood? I’m so confused as to what racist crap I’m supposed to believe this week.

I understand why some factions of the GOP have rallied to this guy. This federal government does own a huge amount of land out west and has a long history of conflicts with ranchers and other people trying to make a living. THAT is a genuine issue. But with every word this guy says, it becomes clear that they could not have picked a worse vessel for this issue than Cliven Bundy. Good grief.

Bundy and his allies are, without a doubt, part of that base. And this a problem that the Republican Party, writ large, refuses to address.

Actually, the party is addressing them in so much as individuals at all levels are spending lots of time explaining how these comments aren’t *really* racist. Which usually quickly segues into suggesting that people who reads them as racist are projecting their own inherent racism onto the comments.

I expect that pretty soon we’re going to learn that to our shock, Mr. Bundy has *strong* views on Mexicans and Illegal Immigrants as well.

Private grazing fees run around $15 per animal/month. The fee for grazing on public land is $1.35 per animal/month. That’s a 91% discount…and yet this guy still owes us over $1M.
In what bizarro-world is that even defensible in any way?

Stop looking for intellectual consistency in people who are driven solely by emotions of rage, self-pity, fear and hate. In other words, Republicans. This is the Tea Party. Some are more socialized and manage to hide their nastiness, some are incapable of that much discipline.

Remember back when Doug Mataconis was telling us how absurd the Occupy people were, and how genuine the Tea Party folks were?

Well, the whole country is talking about economic inequality, thanks in large part to Occupy. And we’ve seen the true nature of the Tea Party. A nature that was instantly obvious, but which conservatives and libertarians are apparently still being surprised by.

I said it when these aszholes first appeared. It was not hard to see. It was as OBVIOUS as writing in all-caps. Stop looking at people’s sanitized official statements and look at their motivation. You’ll understand a whole lot more. Watch motivation and character, and listen closely to the phrases and words they carefully avoid, not just to what they say, but what they don’t say. There’s nothing like white space to tell you what someone really thinks.

Receiving farm subsidies – not a moocher. On the contrary! Heroic patriot is more likely.
Getting disability payments (while White) – not mooching.
Something those other people over there are getting = totally mooching.

The blahs get sooper sekrit welfare (no doubt by nefarious means), but fine upstanding white folks get things they deserve. Because reasons.

Oh, I think we’ll be seeing more clear denials now (e.g., Rand Paul flatly rejected Mr. Bundy’s race commentary). It’s just too blatant. This isn’t dog whistling about “urban youths” or a “culture of poverty” or whatever. The guy flat out said the ‘ole “they were better off as slaves” thing. Right out loud. That’s far, far too blatant. Lee Atwater ‘splained this long ago.

@Rob in CT: Exactly, they’re not upset about what he said, they’re just upset that he didn’t use a dog whistle. When Paul Ryan talks about the culture of not working, especially in the inner cities, he knows exactly who his audience is. It’s people like Bundy sitting in his living room, watching him on tv and yelling “damn straight”.

I have some experience with this. My late mother, who died a year ago at 90, was a racist. She grew up in Idaho and eastern Washington and probably didn’t see more than a handful of blacks until she moved to the Portland area when she was 18. When Obama was elected in 2008 she was convinced the United States was finished. I think his reelection in 2012 contributed to her death.

My grandfather had a similar reaction to Mr. Obama, likely due in part to his racism but also b/c he was already a winger and listened to a lot of hate radio, which feeds all the wrong tendencies. He wrote a really sad, pathetic manifesto talking about armed revolution in response to Obama’s election. Or maybe just printed one he found on the ‘net out, but I think he wrote it. I recognized his style. For reasons beyond his control, grandpa never made it past 8th grade, and it showed. Then again, that seems to be the default writing level for that sort of thing. Which brings us back to the self-refuting Mr. Bundy.

I mean, I get how you can be racist to a race you’ve never even seen, but it just seems inauthentic. I prefer authentic racism. I’m weird like that.

I would argue that authentic racism tends to precede actual encounters with people of other races. Indeed, having set views of others without any real evidence seems to be the very essence of racism, yes?

@Matt Bernius: No I suspect we’re going to hear a lot of quotes from Bill Cosby and Barack Obama encouraging blacks to achieve more in their lives and careers and somehow that will be exactly equal to what Bundy said.

I would argue that authentic racism tends to precede actual encounters with people of other races. Indeed, having set views of others without any real evidence seems to be the very essence of racism, yes?

I think there’s still room for hokey generalizations from a few bad examples in the world of racism (with confirmation bias to gird the foundation). This breed of “authentic” racism is going extinct, and the world should mourn such earnest opponents to equality. Now all we have are inexperienced idiots.

@Tillman: I’m thinking all caps would have helped. My snark detector must be working again, I read it as sarcasm the first time I read it. That doesn’t happen very often. I think I need to treat myself to something nice for lunch now.

@Steven L. Taylor: I was born and raised in North Dakota. I never saw a black person until they staffed the Air Force bases when I was about ten. The only people we had to discriminate against were Catholics and Indians, and nobody seemed to mind the Catholics all that much. As a result I grew up largely innocent of race as an issue. I’ve since realized my reaction was atypical. Most of my peers came out closer to Bundy. So I agree that racism does seem to precede contact, but it’s a phenomenon I don’t really understand.

…I hope no one is surprised that an old man rancher isn’t media trained to express himself perfectly. He seems to be decrying what big government has done to the black family — which big government has negatively affected not just the black family, but all families regardless of ethnicity — so perhaps he included that in his remarks against big government? I’m just trying to figure out how he even got to the point of discussing it and yes, it’s justified to have a healthy suspicion of the New York Times.

He’s not racist, he’s just defending “the black family” but not doing it well because he isn’t “media trained” and by the way the NYT is full of crap.

I expect to see more of this line of thinking from Bundy’s conservative fan base.

One day a couple weeks ago I was driving to a meeting and NPR had Car Talk on, so I switched over to the local Dittohead station and Hannity was on interviewing Bundy by phone.

What really stuck out to me was when he said that the Constitution was divinely inspired. I am a big Constitution fan – I think it’s one of the greatest governing documents ever written, but it has many flaws. One of the things that jumped out to me when he said it was divinely inspired was how he reconciled that view with the reality of the 3/5ths Compromise. Well, now I know.

His views on the Constitution and Divine Providence quickly led me to another realization that has not been covered much in either the Right-Wing Breitbart version of events, nor the DailyKos version: Mr. Bundy is a devout Mormon. The LDS Church teaches, among other fantastical claims, that the Constitution is divinely inspired. This should really come as no surprise, as the LDS Church is a uniquely American religion. What other religion with over a million followers teaches that Jesus communed with the Native Americans, an American treasure hunter was also the divine revelator, and, yes, that the U.S. Constitution is more or less handed down by God – dehumanization of blacks and all?

That’s not to somehow distract from Mr. Bundy’s own egregiously illegal and hypocritical actions, but I think there’s an important sub-story here about Mormon views on race, history, and self-sufficiency.

What other religion with over a million followers teaches that Jesus communed with the Native Americans, an American treasure hunter was also the divine revelator, and, yes, that the U.S. Constitution is more or less handed down by God – dehumanization of blacks and all?

Wasn’t it Mormon doctrine for a while that black people were those who didn’t take a side in the heavenly war between Lucifer and the Mormon Jesus? (~2:35 in this video) Filthy neutrals are only 3/5ths a person since they can’t pick a side to begin with, after all.

@Steven L. Taylor:
I grew up in VT…there was one black family in town back in the mid 70’s. The father was a teacher, and his son was a classmate. I like to think that, although no one is perfect, I am not a racist.
My younger brother attended high school, and a brief stint in college, in Florida where he was exposed to plenty of black and brown people. He is a terrible racist…to the point that I don’t bother talking to him any longer.
I think exposure will assuage natural bias in the open-minded, and nothing ever will in the close-minded.

National Review correspondent Kevin Williamson, who recently compared Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy to Mahatma Gandhi, told TPM in an email on Thursday that he thought Bundy’s racially charged comments were “lamentable” but they were “separate” from Bundy’s standoff with the Bureau of Land Management.
“Mr. Bundy’s racial rhetoric is lamentable and backward,” Williamson said in an email. “It is also separate from the fundamental question here, which is the federal government’s acting as an absentee landlord for nine-tenths of the state of Nevada.”
“I very strongly suspect that most of the men who died at the Alamo held a great many views that I would find repugnant; we remember them for other reasons.”

Interesting video. I have to acknowledge that it’s an anti-Mormon propaganda film, but the contents seem on par with what I know.
At the risk of being flippant, tt sounds to me like the Mormon origin story is very similar to Superman’s.

I think the Youtube comments section is right that this view on blacks has been replaced with the more open-minded view that blacks are descended from Cain (i.e. they bear the “mark of Cain” – the punishment he was branded with following his brother’s murder).

The sad part about this is that even without his racist statements, there was already much to condemn in Bundy’s statements and actions. Yet the right wing rallied to him as a patriot and American hero.
Now of course, Fox News and the the rest of the Right Wing BS Machine are so all in on defending him that they have to keep it up, even if they have to spout nonsense… but then, I guess they do so much of that anyway!
I just hope that this is a turning point and that the audience for the RWBSM now realise how much of what they hear is wrong… but who am I kidding? There will be some other bright shiny object just around the bend, and if not, oh well… BENGHAZI!

One remark on racism and local prevalence of races. In 1933, all of Germany had 500,000 Jews, about the same rate as African-Americans in Montana (0.7% of the population). And most of those were assimilated, with no “visual” or lifestyle difference to a German.
Sadly, you don’t need to see your enemy on a daily basis to just “know” they’re the enemy.

P.S. I also wonder if Clive Bundy has ever even MET someone with dark skin. He sounds like he’s regurgitating scraps of Limbaugh and other talk radio. No, scratch that. Even further back. A Morman production of Showboat from the 1940s? “Learning to pick cotton”? Who learns to pick cotton anymore? Isn’t it harvested with a thresher?

Interesting video. I have to acknowledge that it’s an anti-Mormon propaganda film, but the contents seem on par with what I know.

I agree with every particular. The cartoon’s obvious (almost said cartoonishly) propaganda, but the problem is nothing in it contradicts anything else I’ve heard, even from Mormons I know.

Their racial stance has changed since it was produced (or since when I’m guessing it was produced). Hell, the ban on black priests has been gone for three decades. I just found the theological explanation for black people in Mormonism interesting in light of what you posted. It is a uniquely American religion.

I pretty much thought Bundy was a freeloading anti-government crank. Then I read an article defending him that pointed out that all federal land management laws are written with a clause that the new law does not superseded existing established water or use rights. I thought that it was ironic that under the federal laws Bundy disavowed, he actually did have rights established by his family in the 1870’s. He was still a nut bag, but one with at least one true point. Maybe he got nuts due to govt abuse. Then I read a series of articles by KLAS news in Las Vegas about the provenance of Bundy’s land.

“They are literally treating western United States citizens, ranchers, rural folks like this- are the modern day Indians. We’re being driven off of our lands. We’re being forced into reservations known as cities,” Justin Giles, an Oathkeeper from Alaska, said.

@Mikey:
You show a shocking lack of understanding our county and its founding values….

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Dude, the line line of the Declaration after the list of rights is “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”

Jefferson (nor Locke, whom he was cribbing) did not argue that men are free and therefore do not need government. The whole point of Locke’s Second Treatise was about the need for government even though men are born into a state of perfect freedom. The ongoing attempts to divorce government from the conversation is ridiculous and underscores you don’t understand the documents from which you are quoting nor the foundations of the philosophies that under-gird them and that informed their authors.

@Eric Florack: As Steven has already pointed out, the defining purpose of a government is to secure those rights.

A nation without a government is not a nation at all. Definitionally, it’s not. The Founding Fathers understood that, and in your effort to say I don’t understand, you show it is actually you who doesn’t understand.

“Where is our colored brother? Where is our Mexican brother? Where is our Chinese — where are they?” Bundy said. “They’re just as much American as we are, and they’re not with us. If they’re not with us, they’re going to be against us.”

That’s right all you “coloreds” and Mexicans and Chinese. If you don’t support Bundy’s lawbreaking, you are the enemy of him and his militia buddies itching to shoot someone. It might be wise to avoid that area.

@CB: @dennis: Ah, to be a C-lister again. To be able to say anything and not give a crap about the opinions of strangers over the Internet. Then you get that one comment with more than 50 upvotes, and suddenly you start feeling self-conscious on the Internet.

I imagine that’s how it works; I think I’m still C-list. Do we really want popularity contests around here?

I have a question for those who call themselves Conservatives and I should preface it by saying this is a real question spurred by sincere curiosity.

I think modern American Conservatism got its start in the late 1940’s and since that time, year by year, person by person, the acknowledged leaders of the movement have been the champions of racism, sexism and religious intolerance. At any given point – say, today – conservatives will nod to the fact that they no longer feel that some previous cause Conservatives championed (ex: Jim Crow) was just, but you can’t get past the fact that they are part of an unbroken chain that was on the wrong side of every major issue. So – why do people call themselves Conservatives? Why do they feel it is a source of pride?

@MarkedMan:
Reasonable conservatives (the ones who, eventually & essentially, will admit they’re probably always wrong & on the losing side) will tell you that standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” is important because change can be bad & there will be unintended consequences, let’s be prudent, yada. Which is far from an absurd position, but they’re going to extremes w/ it these days.

Cynics might suggest that whatever conservatives say, their only real goal is conserving power in the hands it’s already in, & that the standing athwart history bit is the closest they can get to admitting their real goals w/o being run out of town on a rail.

As far as crazed radicals who recognize no law enforcement authority higher than the county sheriff, deny the existence of the Federal government w/ one breath & then invoke the Constitution w/ the next (my head is still spinning from that) I’m waiting to see if the next edition of the DSM has anything informative.

Although fear (of anything & everything) seems to motivate many of them. I’m no scientist or doctor, obviously more research is needed, but when someone starts acting a bit off, isn’t the first medical move to look for a possible physical cause rather than starting psychotherapy immediately?